


040 "bearskin"

by wheel_pen



Series: Iron Man AU [40]
Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Fish out of Water, My Pepper is different, Naughtiness, Pre-Iron Man, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-12
Updated: 2013-04-12
Packaged: 2017-12-08 07:33:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/758758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony has a date with his prostitute friend Melanie, to christen the living room he and Pepper just redecorated. The new theme somehow incorporates… a fake pink bearskin rug, with a head. “You would not believe how long it took me to explain this thing to Pepper.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	040 "bearskin"

**Author's Note:**

> 1) My Pepper is very different from canon Pepper. Her personality/origin is very different; to separate her from canon Pepper I've given her a new last name and a different hair color.
> 
> 2) The bad words are censored. That's just how I do things.
> 
> 3) Stories are numbered in the order I wrote them, which isn't necessarily the order in which they occur. The timeline is Chapter 2 of story 031 “wet.”
> 
> I wrote this series after the first Iron Man movie came out. It's very AU but I hope you'll enjoy it anyway. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play with these characters.

“Looking for a good time, mister?” the attractive brunette asked, leaning on the door of my car.

“Ha,” I responded sarcastically. “Don’t quit your day job, sweetie. Oh, wait.”

“Ha,” she threw back, rolling her eyes as she opened the door and slid into the car. That was why I liked Melanie—good sense of humor. Well, obviously that wasn’t the _only_ reason.

We leaned across the center console of the front seat to exchange greeting kisses, then I glanced around to make sure none of the heaps of garbage surrounding us had moved, and I pulled the car out of the alley. Not the most romantic meeting spot, but then again Melanie and I weren’t pursuing a romance—we were pursuing a business relationship, which happened to be illegal. Hence, discretion was occasionally called for. If only I liked _all_ my business associates this much, though.

“So, I guess we’re not—oh, hi, Pepper! I didn’t see you back there,” Melanie said cheerfully, turning to look in the back seat.

“Hello, Ms. Melanie,” Pepper replied politely.

Melanie raised an eyebrow. “’Ms.’ Melanie? Ooh, kinda makes me feel like a crotchety old Southern woman being driven around by Morgan Freeman.”

“I’m more of a Samuel L. Jackson,” I decided. “Pepper discovered that your entire name was not, in fact, ‘Melanie’ and now she’s conflicted about what to call you,” I explained as we barreled down the freeway. “Pepper strives for ever greater levels of formality, you know.”

“Oh. It’s Parker, actually,” Melanie told Pepper patiently. That was another good quality of hers—she was very accepting of Pepper. “But you don’t have to call me ‘Ms. Parker’ or anything.”

“Oh, of _course_ she does,” I countered, glancing at Pepper in the rear view mirror. “She just wouldn’t feel _comfortable_ calling you by your first name, would you, Pepper?”

“It _would_ be counter to my instincts,” Pepper agreed.

“’Ms. Parker’ is what my lawyer calls me,” Melanie commented. “I’ll feel like I’m back in court again.” ‘Melanie Parker’ was not her real name, of course, despite the stack of picture IDs, credit cards, and even a passport attesting to it. Her real name was Margaret Drucker. Not many people outside of Cranston, New Mexico actually knew that, but I had known Melanie for years and assisted her out of the occasional jam. ‘Melanie Parker’ had a police record, you see, while ‘Margaret Drucker’ did not, in case she wanted to change careers someday and her new employers wouldn’t look kindly on a history of arrests for prostitution. None of those arrests were connected to _me_ , in case you were wondering, but to other, less savvy clients. Although—oddly enough—I _do_ have one little arrest related to that vice on my record, not involving Melanie, and in fact I was totally innocent (that time). Remind me to get back to that story sometime.

“So I take it we’re not going to a fancy cocktail party tonight,” Melanie guessed, glancing at my expensive but decidedly non-formal jeans and t-shirt.

“No, I thought we’d stay in,” I replied, “if that’s okay with you.” She indicated it was. “We just redecorated the living room and I thought we could christen it.” Wink, wink.

“Ooh, sounds fun,” Melanie agreed. “Why’d you decide to redecorate?”

Like a billionaire _needed_ a reason. Maybe it was just Tuesday. Well, actually, I _did_ have a reason, as it happened. “I knocked over the liquor cabinet,” I replied casually. “Hard to get stains like that out of the carpet and couches, as it turns out. So I figured we would just redecorate.”

“Oh. Okay.” Melanie also knew when _not_ to ask questions.

“But I think I like it better now,” I decided. “Plus we got this _awesome_ bearskin rug to put in front of the fire! Don’t worry, it’s fake,” I assured Melanie at her look. She preferred to be a vegetarian when it didn’t alienate her clients.

“It’s _pink_ ,” Pepper put in from the back seat. “And it has a _head_.”

“You would not believe how long it took me to explain this thing to Pepper,” I told Melanie.

“It _sounds_ like it needs some explanation,” she decided. “What possible decorating scheme could a pink bearskin rug—“

“With a _head_ ,” repeated Pepper.

“—a pink bearskin rug with a _head_ possibly go with?” Melanie teased good-naturedly. “Fairy princess hunting lodge?”

“Okay, well, the bearskin rug doesn’t really _go_ with the rest,” I admitted. “I just saw it and it _called_ to me. I had to have it. Some kind of past-life psychic connection to the animal spirit. Er, the fake animal?”

“Maybe you felt a connection to the dinosaurs, who were compressed into petroleum, which was turned into the polyester the rug is probably made from,” Melanie suggested.

I laughed. “Okay, mostly it’s probably because it freaks Pepper out so much.”

“It _watches_ me,” she complained. “I don’t like the rugs to have facial features.”

“You’re so picky,” I accused. “So what do you want for dinner?” I added to Melanie. “Pizza, Mexican, Greek, Indian? If they don’t deliver Pepper can just go get it.”

“Oh, I just want a salad,” she replied. This was one thing I _didn’t_ like about Melanie—too healthy. The woman didn’t even usually order dessert, which was a tiny bit unnatural in my opinion. “Where did I get that really good salad that one time? With the little crunchy things and…”

I gave her a look. “Sorry, I’d have to consult my journal—that’s where I record all the details about the fabulous salads you eat.”

Melanie rolled her eyes. “The Blue Moon Diner,” Pepper remembered. “On 43rd and Coventry.”

“That’s it!”

“Oh, they have really good hamburgers, so that’s okay,” I decided. “We can swing by if you want.” I made a turn that pointed us away from home but towards delicious grilled cheeseburgers. And a salad, apparently. Shudder.

“So this is just for tonight, right?” Melanie confirmed as we drove along.

“Right,” I agreed. “What are you doing tomorrow night, anyway? And why wasn’t I invited?” Melanie had a very high level of clientele—I often saw her at charity balls, art gallery openings, and political fundraisers with some of San Francisco’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens, myself included. “I wasn’t invited to anything tomorrow night, was I, Pepper?” She indicated no.

“It’s a personal date,” Melanie replied.

“Ooh, with whom?” I prodded gleefully. “Come on, you can tell me. Just a hint.”

“Actually,” she answered, seeming very pleased with herself, “it’s with my boyfriend.”

My eyes skittered from the road to her several times. “Your _what_?”

“My boyfriend,” she repeated happily. “He’s _so_ great, Tony! He’s a doctor. An infectious diseases specialist. I met him at a charity dinner for malaria prevention in Africa. He was a speaker. He’s done all this volunteer work in the Congo.” She sighed, a little smile on her face. “He is just _so_ fantastic.” I continued to regard her with sidelong looks. “Oh, sorry, am I making you uncomfortable?” she asked after a moment.

“Well, J---s, Melanie, we’re gonna be having sex within a couple hours,” I pointed out. “Hopefully several times before you leave the house tomorrow morning. It’s a _little_ weird to hear you gushing about being in love with another guy.” This seemed to put a damper on the mood in the car. “I mean, well, I’m happy for you, though,” I added after an awkward silence. “But your last boyfriend was an a-----e.”

“I know, I know,” she agreed, turning towards me in the seat. “But Paul is different. He has such a good heart and—“

“ _Paul_?” I repeated in a scoffing tone. “ _Paul_? What kind of a name is _Paul_?”

“It’s from the Bible,” Pepper supplied from the back. “It comes from the Aramaic—“

“Would I like him?” I asked Melanie. “I should take you guys out to dinner sometime. Check him out.” I always looked out for my friends.

“You would think he was a big, squishy dork,” Melanie confessed, but she was grinning—obviously she didn’t find his big, squishy dorkiness to be a problem.

“Hmm, maybe Rhodey should take him out for dinner, then,” I suggested. “He has a higher tolerance for that sort of thing.” I thought about how to phrase my next question for half a second, which was 0.45 seconds longer than I usually spent. “So, does… _Paul_ … know what you do for a living?”

“Yes, I told him,” she assured me.

“And he’s okay with that?”

“ _Obviously_ ,” Melanie shot back. “If he wasn’t, either we wouldn’t be together still, or _I_ wouldn’t be _here_.”

“Point taken,” I conceded. “How long have you been seeing him?”

“About six months.”

I frowned. “How long since the last time _we_ went out?” I definitely would’ve remembered hearing about this guy before.

“About five months.”

“Oh. Really? That long?” She nodded. Well, it wasn’t like I was a _constant_ patron of the professional companions (unlike _some_ people I knew, initials O.S.). And I _did_ consort with professionals besides Melanie. “Hmm. No, I still think it’s weird,” I decided. “What kind of a guy would want to date someone knowing they were gonna have sex with other people on a regular basis? Unless of course they were _into_ that…”

Melanie made a noise of disgust at my judgmental attitude. “He’s not _kinky_ ,” she asserted. “He’s just open-minded. He said with everything he’s seen in his work in the Congo, he’s just glad I’m happy with my job and able to feed myself.”

“That’s a ringing endorsement.”

“Besides, it’s not like I’m gonna do this _forever_ , you know,” she continued. “I’d like to get married someday, have kids… maybe get into real estate.”

“What? Here I was counting on regular visits in the nursing home,” I told her with a grin.

“You don’t ever see yourself settling down someday, Tony?” Melanie poked. “Having kids? Ever?”

I glanced in the rear view mirror to check on Pepper, who hadn’t been saying much lately. She was poking busily at her phone, as ever. “Who wants to _settle_?” I replied to Melanie. “Who wants to be the crud on the bottom of the stream that falls out when the water slows down?”

She rolled her eyes. “Well, fine then. We won’t talk about it anymore.”

“Okay. Good. Congrats, though. Let me know if he turns out to be a d—k and I’ll have him sent to the Congo permanently.”

“Okay,” she agreed with a smile. “Well, if we’re going back to professional matters…”

“That’s your cue, Pep,” I announced.

Dutifully Pepper popped up in the back seat. “I went to the bank today, as you instructed, Mr. Stark,” she began, pulling an envelope out of her purse.

“Did you get smaller bills this time?” Melanie asked politely.

Pepper’s expression said she did _not_ complete her mission successfully. “I _tried_ ,” she explained, “but it seems as though all the paper currency in this country is the same size.” Melanie blinked at her. “Unlike coins, for example, which are minted in _multiple_ sizes. Would you perhaps prefer your payment in dimes? Those are the smallest form of American currency.”

Melanie turned to me, uncertain how to respond to that suggestion. “Yeah, I could give you fifty thousand dimes,” I assured her. “I could send you home in a truck full of them.” This did not seem to be what Melanie really had in mind. As I knew, of course. “Just give her the cash, Pepper. I’ve got some more at home, I can probably break the big bills for you,” I told Melanie.

“Oh, no, it’s okay, really,” Melanie insisted, taking the envelope from Pepper. “It’s not a problem.” It was nice that Melanie wasn’t whiny and demanding, either.

“Unfortunately explaining this concept to Pepper might take a while,” I commented. “Probably diagrams will be involved. But,” I added as inspiration struck, “maybe when we get home we could play… the sweet little customer and the big bad bank teller.”

“Bank tellers are _so_ sexy,” Melanie deadpanned.

“It’s that high counter,” I agreed. “You never know what they might be wearing below it, if anything.”

At last we found the Blue Moon Diner. I drove by it and parked behind a motel a couple blocks away. “Okay, Pep, go get me a couple cheeseburgers and Melanie’s salad,” I instructed. “And whatever you want. Do you have enough cash to pay for it? Okay, we’ll wait here.” Now, if someone had really _wanted_ to link me, Melanie, and prostitution, they probably could have—I mean, Melanie and I went out to eat together, arrived at and left public functions together, even went shopping together occasionally. An intrepid “journalist” could come up with evidence that we didn’t follow the traditional “just friends” model, like us making out in the car as we waited for Pepper to return. They could even probably track the cash that flowed out of my bank account and into hers, which would be the _really_ bad part.

Still, I wasn’t really _that_ worried about it—Melanie had a lot of other clients who would be very interested in making sure that scandal stayed away from her, in case she was tempted with a reduced sentence for naming names. The politicians and the married men had a _lot_ more to lose in this situation than _I_ did. So I tried to be discreet, I tried not to be _obvious_ , but it actually wasn’t something I really worried about, to be honest. Seriously, there were a lot bigger problems in the world than who was slipping a little cash to whom in exchange for a good time. Though you wouldn’t know that from the tabloids.

**

Later that evening… “G-d, this thing _is_ creepy,” Melanie opined, crawling over the pink bearskin rug on the floor before the fireplace.

I crawled after her. “I know. Isn’t it fantastic?” We had eaten our delicious dinner and were currently enjoying a few glasses of a wine that Pepper claimed went well with both cheeseburgers and salads. Not that Pepper was with the two of us at the moment, of course—she had dutifully taken her own cheeseburgers and headed to her room as soon as we got home, giving Melanie and I the desired privacy. “Pepper is _so_ freaked by it.”

“You’re sure it’s fake?” She poked at the head, which was permanently sculpted in an open-mouthed, defiant snarl (not that this expression had done the bear any good—er, the fake bear).

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” I repeated. “There’s a tag on here somewhere. Made in China.” I set my wine glass aside unsteadily and scrambled up to Melanie’s side. “Look at the eyes. See, they’re, like, glass. The glue is a little loose…” I demonstrated how the eyeballs could be rolled inside the fake skull. “Okay,” I giggled, slightly tipsy, “so sometimes, I’ll sit here and watch TV or draw, and Pepper comes in, and when she’s not looking I move the eyes so when she looks again, they’re different!” I chortled at my exceedingly clever prank. “Then, I’m like, ‘Pepper, don’t be so paranoid, of _course_ it didn’t move! Are you crazy?’ Except I’m not, you know, _laughing_ when I say it to her.”

“Good, ‘cause that would probably give it away,” Melanie snickered, equally amused. It was amazing how a little wine could make everything seem so much funnier. But then again, that was old news to me.

“I’m trying to think what else I could do with it,” I added, flopping back down on the rug.

Melanie joined me. “I’ve got a couple ideas,” she responded seductively.

“Well _yeah_ ,” I agreed, “but I mean regarding Pepper.”

“Oh.”

“I thought maybe I could put it over my head,” I began, chuckling at the idea as it formed, “and sneak up on her one night, like, go to her room. Maybe we should do that now! Wouldn’t that be hilarious?”

“’Brilliant billionaire weapons designer Tony Stark beheaded by assistant in late-night accident,’” Melanie predicted of the headlines.

This made me laugh harder, but it also quelled my desire to experiment with surprising Pepper. “It’s all fun and games until someone loses a head,” I agreed. I patted the fake bear. “Just ask this guy!”

**

Yet later that evening… Only half-asleep, I opened my eyes as I heard quiet noises coming from nearby. Melanie and I were still on the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace, under a blanket, more or less asleep after our earlier exertions (and I don’t just mean laughing at my clever ideas). Pepper had decided this would be a good time to creep around and clean up after us and was carefully gathering up the dishes and cheeseburger wrappers. She glanced over and met my eye, but since I didn’t seem to be going anywhere, she continued with her little task. I watched her in the light from the fire—it had to be well after midnight, but her suit from the day was still perfectly crisp, her hair still anchored in place, her shoes still painfully tall and pointy-looking.

Melanie was petite, curvy, and brunette, pretty much the opposite of Pepper in every way (physically, anyway—and in many other ways, too, really, considering she was naked under the blanket with me and Pepper was still wearing work clothes in her own home in the middle of the night). Even if Melanie wedged her feet into some of those towering, expensive heels, she’d barely even reach _my_ height, let alone higher. Plus she would wobble a lot and make me give her a foot rub later, which was fine, the foot rub part anyway. I wondered if Pepper’s feet ever hurt in those shoes. Maybe she would like a foot rub sometime? It was difficult to picture.

Melanie twitched suddenly in my arms. She was facing me, her back to the rest of the room, and no doubt the combination of noises and shadows Pepper was generating was a bit unsettling to someone who’d just awakened. “It’s just Pepper,” I assured her.

“Oh,” she answered sleepily. Melanie squirmed around, not for any pleasant yet slightly kinky purpose, given Pepper’s presence, but rather merely to roll over.

“Air pocket!” I protested grumpily as her movements let a draft into an uncomfortable place.

“Hey, Pepper, are you gonna get my clothes cleaned for me?” Melanie asked drowsily.

“I could, if you would prefer that, Ms. Parker,” Pepper offered. She usually made off with my guests’ clothes in the night and left them drycleaned in the bedroom for them to wear the next morning when they left.

“Well, I brought a change,” Melanie replied, “but it would be nice. If you don’t mind.”

“You’ve got some clothes here, too,” I reminded her. “Don’t forget about them. You might want them back one of these days. If you and _Paul_ take off.”

She snorted. “Let’s not get carried away. We’re not engaged yet. Pepper, I love your shoes!” Obligingly Pepper walked over to our little nest so Melanie could see her footwear better. “That is _so_ sexy,” she sighed, rubbing the black leather. “Ferragamo?”

“Yes. They’re new.”

“Okay, that’s about all the torment I can take,” I announced, sitting up.

“Hey, air pocket!” Melanie groused, pulling the blanket around her more tightly. “What torment?”

Oh, like it was perfectly innocent when my date fondled my assistant’s shoes in the middle of the night. While Pepper was holding Melanie’s underwear. I felt I’d had a dream along those lines recently. Disturbingly, the dead pink bear might have factored into it, too. “Lying on the floor like this,” I replied to Melanie’s question. “We should’ve put some pillows under this rug first. Let’s go up to the bed so I can actually move my back tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“You can take the blanket,” I assured Melanie, when the process of standing threatened to become awkward. Because a _certain person_ apparently had no intention of leaving the living room until she’d picked up every bit of debris from the evening. But Pepper had seen me naked plenty of times, so I figured one more wouldn’t bother her. “’Night, Pepper.”

“Goodnight, Mr. Stark.”

* * *


End file.
